'Invoking "Think of the children" is just as bad here as anywhere else.'

If you can't see the obvious tragic death of a child (with their future robbed from them) having a heavier weight than an 80 y/o great grandmother who's had a wonderful life then I can't help you.

Yes, NOBODY deserved what happened to them -- but as someone who's experienced the death of elder loved ones and children, I can tell you the conversations about loss are quite different at their respective wakes.

Oh thank god I'm not the only one. The needle/haystack and whether it is str_foobar or strfoobar drives me nuts. Especially since the phrase is "needle in a haystack" but the function takes haystack, needle. I always want to write find(needle, [in a] haystack). Every language has good and points, and bad coders are bad coders.

Wow. This internets thing is cool.

From Menace:

"Most of the stuff written about Bats' Cave gives a wrong impression. It's the air storage tank for the city, just like all the colonies have - the place where the scavenger pumps, deep down, deliver the air until it's needed. We just happen to be lucky enough to have one big enough to fly in. But it never was built, or anything like that; it's just a big volcanic bubble, two miles across, and if it had broken through, way back when, it would have been a crater."

Same author -- The Menace from Earth (1957).

Not sure if it were "lava tubes" (it's probably been over 30 years since I read that), but the idea of giant caverns being possible due to low gravity + high atm pressure was sure there.

So sayth the man who missed over 400 roll calls as "Senator Barack Obama."

Funny, I was thinking just the opposite. Rural areas would be easier since there are few interactions with other cars. And they'd be able to react faster when a deer jumps in front of you. Of course, getting a heads up infrared would go a long way to avoiding deer at night. Unless it is planting or harvesting time, the odds of seeing and interacting with anything on gravel road here are practically nil. Maybe 1 vehicle for every 10 miles I drive. Computers should find that pretty easy. All you have to do is keep it between the fenceposts.

Just out of curiosity, what size city do you live in? I'd love to have a self-driving car so I could spend more time at my mother's instead of leaving early so I don't fall asleep on the 2 hours of boring interstate to drive home. And that's just one example. It's a 5 hour drive to Chicago; I'd love to just pull on the interstate and let the car take over for the ride home after a tiring day. In town for groceries and shopping is probably the last place I would let the car take over. There are more variables, but speeds are slower, and it would keep me in practice. Long drives on the interstate, where there are fewer variables would be the first place I'd use it. Sure, the speeds are faster and accidents are worse, but the cars around you are all going in one direction, approximately the same speed, and there are almost no stops, so less to react to. And if the cars can talk to one another it would be even better. Add in infrared detectors to spot the deer in the ditches in the middle of the night and I'd be set.

Plus installing LAMP is sounds cooler than installing LAPP.

The amount of energy taken out is surely small. It's not like the other side of the windmill has no air movement. The blades only capture a part of the wind's energy; the air has to keep moving beyond the blades, otherwise the wind would hit the blades, stop, and the blades wouldn't move. Gently blow on a pinwheel and you'll feel the air moving on the other side of the pinwheel. No one asks this question whenever we put up a new 10 story building, but they must absorb more wind energy. A 10 story building is a solid block and stops almost more of the wind that hits it; I assume some air is buffeted out and moves around the building, but not much. In addition, wind mills don't run if the wind speed is above or below a certain speed. I want to say something like 25mph, but I can't be arsed to google right now. Buildings block all the wind, regardless of speed. Well, up until the wind knocks them down. I'd bet a whole dollar that the buildings in a single large city like New York, London, Chicago, etc. capture and disrupt far more wind energy that every windmill on the planet today and every one planned for the next 20 years.

Declare bot-nets a utility -- then regulate them.

(ducks and runs)